Jamaica's new PM vows to ditch royal rule

Follow Us

Jamaica's new Prime Minister -- who won by a landslide -- has vowed to turn the island into a republic, eliminating the Queen as the head of state. This may seem pretty pro-forma, but in the past few years, Canada's royal representative, the Governor General, has allowed the Prime Minister to suspend parliament for highly politicized reasons, at one point leaving Canada without government in the midst of the financial crisis. The Commonwealth bargain is meant to be that the Queen's rep acts as a non-political, sober oversight of last resort. But in Canada, the GG let the Prime Minister shut down Parliament to avoid a no-confidence vote and to shut down an embarrassing Parliamentary inquiry about Canada's complicity in the indefinite detention, torture and murder of Afghani war prisoners. Against this backdrop, it seems to me that getting rid of royal "governance" can only be a good thing.

"I love the Queen; she is a beautiful lady," Simpson Miller said, before declaring to the audience in Jamaican patois: "But I think time come."

Simpson Miller said she could replace the privy council in London with the Trinidad-based Caribbean court of justice as Jamaica's highest court of appeal. She said this would "end judicial surveillance from London."

She vowed her government would "ease the burdens and the pressues of increasing poverty, joblessness and deteriorating standards of living" while also pursuing a tight fiscal policy and forging strong partnerships with the private sector and international partners such as the International Monetary Fund.

Trump wants to roll back regulations that promote low-power light bulbs, even though at this point the industry has moved on and isn’t likely to do much in the way of modernizing incandescents. His interest is, as always, deeply personal: he thinks LED lights make him look orange. “The light bulb,” the president began. “People […]

President Trump this morning fired John Bolton, his national security mustache. Trump cited various disagreements with him over policy. I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration, and therefore. … I asked […]

Here someone states the obvious, because it must sometimes be asserted in the face of caviling over the ethics of stating the obvious: the president is not well. Accepting the reality about the president’s disordered personality, writes Peter Wehner, is essential. Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining […]

The field of data analytics can get intimidating, even for business professionals who constantly rely on it. But at its heart, its purpose is to simplify. To take mounds of information and distill their insights into a single clear picture. Currently, the go-to software for painting that picture is Tableau. And if you want to […]

If you’re in the market for a stable, durable camera fully suited for first-person video, there’s a good chance that you’re the adventurous type. So why settle on a familiar name like GoPro? The DJI Osmo Action 4K HDR Camera checks off all the same boxes on the action cam checklist as the GoPro 4K […]

The market for web developers is wide open these days. If only we could say the same about the pathway to that career. If you’re not already an experienced coder, it can be difficult to get things rolling. A four-year college degree or technical school? Sure, if you’ve got the money. What about web tutorials? […]